What exactly happened between Percy Paris and Keith Colwell outside the MLAs' washroom in Province House last Thursday night? Was it a "scuffle" (CBC, Global), an "alleged scuffle" (Metro, Globe and Mail), an "altercation" (Chronicle-Herald), an "incident" (CTV, Yarmouth Vanguard), a "bizarre incident" (CBC), a "fight" (Yahoo), a "kerfuffle" (also Yahoo), or even a "brawl" (SunNews). "Brawl" seems way over the top, and to my ear, a term tinged with racism in this context. "Scuffle" and "altercation" seem about right. "I guess there would be some physical contact," said Inverness Conservative MLA Allan MacMaster, the one uninvolved eye-witness who has spoken...

11 May, 2013

With so many real and pressing environmental crises threatening to harm Planet Earth, why are so many well-meaning environmentalists so easily diverted into foolhardy projects like the campaign to ban plastic water bottles? On January 1, the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, prohibited the sale of "non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less." To be clear, it's still OK to sell small, plastic bottles of Coke, Red Bull, colored sugar-water, and carbonated water, and it's OK to sell Just Plain Water in 40-oz plastic bottles or gallon jugs. In an approving report on the ban, the Globe and Mail...

03 January, 2013

The Harper government has mounted a classic bucket defence* against charges it illegally steered opposition voters to faraway, fake polling stations in a deliberate attempt to discourage them from voting. Their defenders say: 1. Nothing serious happened. 2. It happened to us too. 3. There's no proof we did it. 4. In fact, it was the Liberals who did it. 5. The calls didn't work anyway. 6. Voters don't care about it. 7. It'll blow over in a day or two. Some of this commentary is just the predictable party-line pandering from pro-Harper media, but a Globe and Mail story purporting to show...

06 March, 2012

Aside from a small issue of geography, reader Ivan Smith says the Globe and Mail's take-out on racism in Nova Scotia, got it right. The popular notion that racism has disappeared from Nova Scotia is just as wrong as that geography. Racism is still here. Not as bad as it was in the 1960s or even the 1980s, but we still have a long way to go. How many Nova Scotians know that there were black slaves here? Smith recommends Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, a book and subsequent film depicting the treatment of blacks in Nova Scotia in the 1780s, available...

19 June, 2010

Writing on the US website The Daily Beast, Ottawa patent consultant and occasional Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan condemns Quebec Premier Jean Charest's bill to ban the traditional Muslim niqab. In a stand reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis's Grande Noirceur, Charest would ban religious veils on grounds  they "subjugate" women. Khan, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, nails the double-standard at play: The most vehement reactions against face-veiling have come from women, who have projected their own fears, assumptions, and judgments onto attire worn by a minority within a minority. They think of the bad old...

09 April, 2010

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's insistence that the torture of prisoners Canada hands over to Afghan authorities is a problem for Afghanistan, not Canada, calls to mind Tom Leher's lyric about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's apparent indifference to the consequences of his work on Germany's World War II V2 rocket: Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun. In fact, as Bob Rae points out in the same Globe and Mail article, transferring prisoners with the expectation they may be tortured is a violation of the Geneva Conventions - a war crime,...

23 December, 2009

Ten days ago, we speculated on the embarrassment Globe and Mail journalists must feel over columnist Christie Blatchford's obsequiousness to the Harper government, as displayed in her columns attacking diplomat Richard Colvin. Paul Wells of Maclean's has an interesting and detailed follow-up in his Inkless Wells blog. Moneyquote: In 20 years in journalism I have never seen anything resembling the systematic and sustained repudiation to which Christie Blatchford, the Globe and Mail’s marquee columnist, is being subjected by her own newspaper. There is room in any good paper for disagreements among colleagues, and frankly there should, for a long time now,...

11 December, 2009

Here is a roundup of newspaper editorials about Richard Colvin's tesimony about Canadian military and civilian complicity in torture. Globe and Mail: If his account is correct, the federal government was so determined to turn a blind eye to the treatment of the detainees by the Afghan National Directorate of Security and police that it discouraged record-keeping and other documentation – highly uncharacteristic behaviour in any bureaucracy. On this, Mr. Colvin gave evidence from his own direct experience, not hearsay. The word “cover-up,” which evokes the Watergate scandal and a concealment of wrongdoing within an institution, or even obstruction of justice, may be...

20 November, 2009

Dale Cummings in the Winnipeg Free Press: Aislin in the Montreal Gazette: Malcolm Mays in the Edmonton Journal: Brian Gable in the Globe and Mail: Gary Clement in the National Post: ...

20 November, 2009

A Contrarian reader who is also a public health nutritionist responds to our post about Fralic's foolishness: This Globe and Mail article convinced me of the importance of getting the H1N1 vaccination.  There is so much misinfomation out there, and I hold health reporter Andre Picard's coverage in high regard. Nova Scotians can find the location and schedule of immunization clinics in their District Health Region here. [On the map, click on your DHA.] I plan to take [my children] to the Baddeck clinic and get us done before the rush. Contrarian expects tomorrow's Baddeck clinic, the first in Cape Breton, to be a...

27 October, 2009
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